NORTHERN PLANNER

During the last couple of weeks I’ve been driving a car with a tapedeck instead of a CD player. At first this was a pain, then it got quite good. Firstly because I’m listening to the radio more, not only more Radio 4 but the odd foray into Radio 2. One surprise was Chris Evans, no longer smug, nasty or annoying, but rather inclusive, a good listener and some fine music. Even better, the tapedeck is making me fall back in love with music I haven’t listened to for ages.

When Cd’s came in, there was lots of tapes I never bothered to upgrade. I also spent hours and hours making my own compilations. Without the nifty ability to jump around the tracks you want, tapes force you to listen to the whole thing. This means you listen to an album as it was intended, and pay more attention to the songs you were not that keen on. I loved listening to ‘New York’ by Lou Reed the other day, it’s supposed to consumed all in one go, and I remembered why. I dug up ‘Songs for Drella’ the duet he did with John Cale when Andy Warhol died – I’d forgotten  it even existed, yet it’s some of the most beautiful, poignant music ever made. Never have two people buried the hatchet with such dignity.

Some of my compilation tapes are more than ten years old, now I’m older I don’t have to cringe at some on guilty pleasures buried there. Gems like Echobelly, Gene, the underrated Eg (ex-Brother Beyond would you believe), and proudly revisiting Lloyd Cole.  I Haven’t listened to any Suede tracks for ages and out pumped ‘Trash’, as fresh as it was in the summer of ’93, there’s the Beatles’ ‘Here comes the Sun’ that I played after I finished my finals.  Some of the songs here are the soundtrack to days as a student, struggling to make ends meet in London, and other things that make me who I am.

I often recoil with horror when I find myself thinking that music isn’t as good as it used to be (not Echobelly obviously) but I realise now that that the music then represents days that will never come again. That’s not saying that life was better then, just different. So what comes out now will never be the same. There’s some good stuff, but since I’ll never again be sharing a Camden flat with a mad Frenchman and a city trader who plays wargames in his spare time, nor study enough for my finals- and I definitely won’t be dumped by Nina Chorzelewski again, it will never mean as much to me as the music I listened to back then.